Employment and Support Allowance Payments

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

Again, that is a good question. As the noble Lord will recognise, we have increased the number of people working on this quite considerably. We are increasing our resources from 400 to 1,200 fully employed people to manage all demands. We have taken a considerable number of staff from those who were focused solely on new ESA claimants. Of course, we are not taking new ESA claimants now because they are going straight on to universal credit, so we have a number of considerably well-trained staff. We are also increasing our training across the piece to make sure that people are fully aware of the support and the exercise required. I am pleased to say that I learned from meetings with officials only last week that we are taking on more and more highly skilled individuals, who want to work with us on this exercise and on universal credit.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, ESA enables passporting to other benefits. What compensation will the department give to those families that lost out from the passporting arrangements? Perhaps I missed something in what the Minister said earlier, but my other question is: what will happen to the payments that would have been due to people who have now deceased? Will their families benefit from these payments by way of compensation?

[Baroness Buscombe]

On the first question, the reality is that we are reviewing all cases potentially affected and paying any arrears of past payments that are due. Our focus is on paying arrears to claimants in line with the primary legislation. With regards to those who have already, sadly, deceased, we are making sure that the money that would have been paid to those individuals will be paid to the families.